Tag: Reading

Reading/Presentation/Workshop Descriptions

Kathryn is available for readings of her poetry and fiction, welcoming opportunities to meet with readers and writers at all levels. She facilitates workshops and especially enjoys meeting with writing groups.

Journal-Pen image LR-1

Participatory presentations and workshops include topics such as:

  • Writing Your Passion: Writing Place (Part 1); Writing Character (Part 2)
    • These two workshops are each facilitated over four Monday evening this fall (Part 1 begins September 11, 2017; Part II begins October 16) at the Belleville Public Library. Check out previous posts on “Workshops and Events” (scroll down) for details.
  • Telling Our Stories: Offered as a two-hour presentation, or a weekend-long writing workshop. Participants are provided a handout or workbook of ideas, strategies, and encouragement that lead to inspiration or, for workshop people, a short creative memoir and a skill-set to carry forward. Besides group work and sharing, writers receive individual feedback to guide and direct.
  • Writing Foreign: in this travel writing workshop – a brief two-hour overview to a weekend of trying your hand, to a 10-day travel experience – participants will explore such topics as:

o Finding Your Voice
o Capturing Place
o Writing People and Culture
o Nitty Gritty (from research to the literary toolbox)
o Movement (from the known world into the unknown and back again)

Relevant here is the work Kathryn did in a Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)-Queen’s University program in development education (1986-1992).

  • Kathryn offers schools and groups two-to-four hour participatory workshop/presentations with “Talking Fantasy Literature” topics such as:

o Fantasy in our Lives
o Portals we Cross
o Through the Unknown
o Magic of Change

This could be followed by a Tapping Your Fantasy writing workshop.

Kathryn taught 14-week-long fantasy literature for credit (through Loyalist College and Ontario Learn online, 15 years). She has also taught fantasy writing at the college level.

Kathryn enjoys traveling, sailing, hiking, photography, and sketching. Born in Southwestern Ontario, Kathryn has lived in Ottawa, Winnipeg, and rural Eastern Ontario. Her home is now in Belleville on the Bay of Quinte. Kathryn holds a B.A. from the University of Windsor and an MPA from Queen’s University, Kingston.

For information about these topics and to discuss others, please contact Kathryn…

email: whiteoakstudio21@gmail.com

Travel & Other Passions: A Room & A Reading Chair

Lucky me! I have a studio room, an atelier, a room of my own. It sits in the front of the house with tall north-facing windows and good light. Once it was the dining room, but rarely used. Now the dining table sits at the rear overlooking the small city backyard. It’s closer to the kitchen with an even better view. Why not?

With the dining table gone – replaced by a smaller more practical one in a place more convenient – the empty space quickly filled with a row of bookcases, a small collection of indigenous baskets, red-tailed hawk feathers (and others) from the fields, favourite photographs and paintings, a drop-leaf worktable, an old secretary topped with a computer (and more bookshelves), and a claw-footed piano stool for the desk. All this came together quite readily as I scrounged through the house and visited Funk & Gruven – all except for an oversize, elusive wing-back chair.

After weeks of peeking into antique and used-furniture stores, I was returning home from a workshop with a fellow writer in a neighbouring town. There, in an old church-cum-shop, stood my chair. It is big; I can curl up in it and be hidden by its high back and broad wings. It is plaid and in my favourite colours – rosy and green hues. It is the perfect chair. In it, I’ve been rereading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, again. Much has changed since c.1928, but travel, life experiences beyond the immediate family and social circle, and a room of one’s own – Woolf’s prerequisites for a literary life – remain paramount. They are more accessible, c.2017, than in Woolf’s day, but still….

I have now spent hours in the chair, lost in virtual travels through distant places and inside others’ lives (hence the book reviews), and I have sketched the chair (but that’s another passion for another day).

Reading Chair Sketch LR-1